In Which Tea Is Drunk
by istartedthefire
Summary: Harry and Hermione drink tea, and Hermione worries about proposing to Ron. That's pretty much it.


"...so if the legislation doesn't go through, all of our efforts will be pushed back at least a year, which I know doesn't sound like that long, but Harry, do you know how long we've been working towards this? Timing is crucial is what I'm saying, and it can all be ruined if—"

"Do you want tea?"

Hermione nodded distractedly.

"Yes, Earl Grey if you have it, but my point is that we have to act as quickly as we can to try and stop it, except Jacobson refuses to sign the stupid piece of paper because he _says_..."

Hermione's voice drifted away as Harry moved towards the kitchen. He put the kettle on—by hand, because somehow it never tasted quite right when he did it all with magic—and got out one of the several mugs that no one but Hermione was allowed to use, along with a Puddlemere United one for himself.

Hermione continued to talk in the background as he reached for ginger snaps, reconsidered, and settled on the caramel bites instead. Hermione, distracted as she was, wouldn't notice if he put one of Hagrid's fruit cakes in front of her, and Ginny would kill him if she came home to find all of the ginger snaps gone.

It was pretty funny, actually, that Ginny's favorite type of biscuits were ginger snaps of all things, although when he'd pointed it out to her, she'd said that she would only find it funny if _his_ favorite sweets were dumbass cakes, and, well, he'd taken the hint.

"...which is of course what I've been trying to do all along!" Hermione was saying as he walked back into the room and settled in an armchair. She accepted the tea with a grateful look and went on, "But Lila "Perfect" Atkers apparently said it louder, because all of a sudden the whole room wanted to do nothing more than agree as loudly as they could to the plan."

She took an angry bite of the caramel and followed it with a sip of tea. Harry watched, not bothering to hide his smile as Hermione visibly melted.

"Mmm, this is great. God, I miss non-magical tea sometimes, you know? Right, as I was saying, everything is going terribly, and unless I can get Lila Atkers to sit in on every single one of my meetings with her stupid hair and stupid face, I'm never going to get anywhere, and I don't know if I should propose to Ron or not because he might not know it, but you and I are perfectly aware of the fact that he could do so much better, and—"

Harry sat up quickly, almost spilling his tea.

"Sorry, back up a little? When did—why are we talking about Ron?"

Hermione raised an eyebrow and put her cup of tea down on the coffee table.

"Is that not what we were doing?"

Harry blinked, realizing, as he occasionally did during conversations with Hermione, as though the topic had shifted from something entirely comfortable to something decidedly not without him detecting it.

"I thought we were talking about your new bill about, uh, giving wands to… was it goblins?"

"It's actually giving rights to mermaids, but that's not important."

"Isn't it?"

Hermione waved a hand in the air.

"Obviously it is, we should never act as though our measly individual struggles take precedence over the continual oppression and suffering of an entire species, but right now I'm saying that I want to propose to Ron and I don't know if I should."

Which, okay, wasn't news to him exactly. She and Ron had been together for almost four years even if you didn't count the time period when Hermione was redoing her seventh year at Hogwarts and they weren't technically together. But, even apart from the question of how Hermione had managed to transition from her Ministry work to her relationship so smoothly that he almost hadn't noticed, was the question of what reason she'd have to not propose.

"I—you do know who you're talking to, right?" Harry asked after a moment, pointedly ignoring the way that Hermione muttered "whom" under her breath. "I asked Ginny to marry me on a Quidditch pitch. You were there. I'm not exactly—"

Hermione waved her other hand in the air, using the other one to take another caramel bite.

Hermione sighed, but in a way that wa"No, I know that, I just want you to do the same thing as always." She shoved the sweet in her mouth, chewed and swallowed hurriedly, and continued. "Just sit there and listen."

"You make me feel so appreciated, Hermione," he said, because she deserved it. "Sit there and listen—no one else could do the things I do for you."

She smiled the way she did when she was trying to be serious.

"You sound like Ron. I always ranted to him, you know, back when we were at school, but this isn't exactly something I can talk at him about. Really, though—just drink your tea."

Harry shrugged, picked up his tea, leaned back in his armchair.

"Right, so, it's—I mean, I've always sort of known that I love him, or if I didn't then that I would someday. Even when he was eleven and supremely irritating, or fifteen and supremely irritating, or twenty-three and supremely irritating, it was just sort of there. And I think it's the same for him, at least a little bit, and that's just—"

She sighed, a somehow forceful, more an exasperated exhale of breath than anything. Usually it meant that she was annoyed at someone, and right now Harry had a feeling that that someone was herself. Or not. He had no idea, actually, when it came down to it, at whom Hermione was annoyed at any point in time.

"Sorry, I just need to collect my thoughts. I guess it's… My parents got divorced two years ago, a little while after I brought them back from Australia. I don't know if I told you or not, because it doesn't really matter that much—"

(As a matter of fact she had, and had been crying all the while, and thank god Ron had been there because neither he nor Ginny had known what to do about it.)

"—and they were, Mum used to tell me sometimes, about how _in love_ they were when they were younger, how she made Dad laugh and how he made her smile and how perfect they were for each other. And even when they quarreled they got over it quickly, and when Dad proposed she didn't even hesitate before saying yes, and they were so happy."

Her mouth twisted.

"For about five years, and then everything went to hell but by then I'd been born, and they agreed to just deal with it, and so for the next twelve years of my life I lived with a mum and a dad who hated each other but tried not to for my sake, and if you're wondering why I liked the Burrow so much that probably explains it."

She took a deep breath.

"I want kids, and so does Ron, but I couldn't possibly do that to them. I'd rather not have kids at all than have them if—I can't even compare my childhood with yours, Harry, of course I was so much better off and I'd never want you to think that I'm somehow belittling your experience—but there's more than one way for your life to be messed up, isn't there?"

Harry took a sip of tea. When Hermione didn't start talking again, he realized that this was probably one of the times when he actually needed to respond.

"Oh, definitely."

She smiled, just the tip of her mouth quirking up.

"Thanks.

"Anyway, I just need to know that that won't happen with me and Ron, but I can't know, and I think that's somehow supposed to be the point except that's a _terrible_ point, I've half a mind to owl Lavender and ask her to See what she can. And everyone knows I can't _stand_ that woman or what she does with those crystal balls."

Harry tried not to grin and failed; she wasn't wrong.

"But really, when it comes down to it, I just don't deserve him in the slightest, and the only reason he's still with me is because he doesn't know it, I'm not sure why not. It's a matter of time, you know, before he realizes. It's what happened with my mum, but unfortunately she only noticed after they already had a daughter, and do you see my problem?"

Harry squinted at her.

"I think you're overthinking it," he said.

Hermione rolled her eyes.

"Of course I'm overthinking it! But am I wrong? I'm not actually wrong, am I?"

Harry considered her, considered the fact that he'd had rather enough of talking about feelings for the next month at least, and reached a decision.

"Look," he said, "you and Ron make each other happy. You should ask him to marry you."

She raised an eyebrow, but Harry was out of things to say. He waited.

"Fine," she said after a pause. "I'll propose."

"Great," Harry said. "Now listen, I've been thinking about our newest case, the Gibson one with the ducks, and I think I've finally got it, but I need to run through the details one more time, I just can't understand why some of them were so much bigger than others, and I think it might be the key to this whole thing…"


End file.
